Tracking Attendance - the advantages of doing it well

Tracking attendance can seem like a tedious administration task for many teachers, trainers and instructors, but do it right and you can save yourself alot of time and effort later.

For those who own a teaching business or who are self employed, you can build a successfull and profitably business more efficiently by understanding who attends your classes.

Use Attendance Templates

No matter where or what you teach, keeping accurate attendance records by the class, weekly, monthly, or by course, using well designed templates for tracking attendance will benefit both you and your students.

Together with instructions on their use, my attendance templates will free up your time and help you to manage your student attendance administration more efficiently.

Reasons to Track Student Attendance

There are a number of different reasons why you may need to record and track your students attendance. It will likely depend on the type of learning or activity that you deliver and whether you are employed, work for yourself or run your own teaching business.

Accurate attendance records will help teachers in the following ways:

• they allow the teacher (trainer or instructor) to analyse student performance and progress and correlate it with the students attendance.

  Is lack of progress linked to poor attendance?

  Was a key lesson missed that explains a students poor performance?

• written student evaluations and reports become easier with accurate attendance records to refer to.

  Notes made on attendance records for individual lessons or courses act as aid memoirs when reviewing a terms or a semesters or even a years work.

• if your students are paying customers it will help you to monitor payment and identify your best and worst customers.

  Someone say that they will pay next week or next month? Keep track of it. Don't let poor administration lose you profits.

• if you are responsible for course or curriculum planning , attendance records can help you to plan for the future.

  Poorly attended lessons may need reviewing and the relevant lesson plans amending.

  Lessons with high attendance levels may require a review of the available resources or even change of venue to accomodate student numbers.

• ensure that only staff that have received adequate and relevant training use restricted equipment, machinery or business critical IT systems.

  Audit trails in large companies and organisations are a necessity and are in place to protect both the employer and employee from misuse of equipment and systems. Tracking attendance of employee training and induction programs is therefore essential.

• Class Attendance Registers
• Weekly Attendance Sheets
• Monthly Attendance Sheets
• Course Attendance Sheets